Impact of homeless children on area school districts can be significant

03.19.10 | Photo by Don Treeger / The Republican | WEST SPRINGFIELD - A school bus leaves the Quality Inn on Riverdale Street after dropping off school children.

HOLYOKE – It wasn't the bedbugs that bothered this city’s health director, Daniel B. Bresnahan, when he inspected a motel room three years ago.

It was the children sleeping in the beds.

“There was a whole family living in one room – two adults and three children,” Bresnahan recalled. “They were washing their clothes in the sink and drying them on wallboards. And, they were cooking in hot pots.”

With that visit in 2007, Bresnahan realized that motels have become de facto dormitories – the place where homeless children go at night after going to school all day. The more Bresnahan thought about it, the worse it seemed.

“There is nothing sadder than seeing a kid get off a school bus and walk into a motel,” he said.

View full sizeNobody likes the idea of children growing up in motels, especially not teachers and principals responsible for educating them. But the number of homeless students is growing across Greater Springfield, forcing school districts to juggle their budgets, bus schedules and even preparations for the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System tests to accommodate them.

The exact number of homeless children in area schools is elusive, partly because the figure fluctuates as families move from one community to another and partly because of different definitions of homeless.

But several factors, including the recession, have caused the population to spike in area school districts.

In Springfield, 1,186 homeless students were enrolled in September, nearly double the number from the previous year; as of March 1, the figure had climbed to 1,300.

In Holyoke, the number fluctuates month to month, with 369 homeless students currently enrolled; the total is 539 for the year, or roughly 10 percent of the student population.

The biggest impact can be seen in West Springfield, where the city’s transportation budget mushroomed from $35,000 to $200,000 this year due to an influx of homeless children living in motels along Riverdale Street. Earlier this year, there were more than 100 children being housed by the state with their families in three motels on Riverdale Street.

Compared to overcrowded shelters or the health risks of living on the street, the plight of homeless families living in motels – and the related issues of school districts that serve them – is one of the lesser examined sides of homelessness.

“Unless you work with homeless people, it isn’t something you’d really know about,” said Geraldine McCafferty, acting director of Springfield’s Office of Housing and Neighborhood Services.

It was the death of a baby at the Clarion Hotel & Conference Center in West Springfield, along with abuse of two homeless children staying in a Westfield motel, which tugged the issue into the spotlight in recent weeks. In Hampshire, Hampden and Franklin counties alone in January, 312 families, including 431 children, were in 11 state-paid motels.

Statewide, the cost of sheltering families in motels ranges from $2 million to $2.5 million a month.
Several legislators, including state Sen. Stephen J. Buoniconti, D-West Springfield, are seeking a ban on placing homeless families in motels and eliminating the practice within a year.

Meanwhile, educators are grappling with the special set of problems posed by homeless students.

In terms of academics, homeless students are twice as likely as those from stable housing to quit school, and they are less likely to score well on standardize tests, studies show. Given the emphasis on MCAS scores, no school district is eager to factor in groups of struggling students to its overall test average.

To help students adjust, area school systems are offering a growing array of support services, from nutrition, health and trauma counseling to after-school MCAS tutoring.

“The students need flexibility, and they need stability, too,” said Constance J. Mahoney, director of prevention and intervention resources for Springfield public schools.

In Springfield, teachers at 13 schools are being trained to anticipate and handle disruptive behavior in students who are homeless or have other, trauma-related problems.

The task is especially tricky with homeless students, according to Mahoney: Often, there are no outward signs that a student is homeless, and many students are unwilling to acknowledge, much less discuss, their family’s troubles.

Sometimes, trouble can flare over something as simple as a backpack.
“You might have a student who throws his backpack (on the floor by his desk) and won’t put it in the coatroom; well, that’s because everything he owns is that backpack,” said Mahoney, who oversees the school’s trauma management training program.

“This has been an education for us, too,” she said.

Just getting homeless students to school has become a daunting task for school districts.

Under federal law, homeless students must be transported to their own schools, regardless of where they are now being sheltered. If a student lives more than an hour drive from their school, the rule does not automatically apply.

This can create a crazy quilt of bus routes, with students living in motels in Greenfield bused to back to Springfield, for instance, and students living in West Springfield making a nearly 100-mile round trip each day to Worcester.

Not surprisingly, Springfield ended up with a $7.5 million school transportation deficit last year, due mostly to rising out-of-district transportation costs that forced the city to pay as much as $800 a day for a single van.

To control costs, the four-company system used by Springfield Public Schools was streamlined to one, saving an estimated $7,000 a day. But, three companies – Admark Transportation, Juju’s Transportation Corp., and Kiddo’s Transportation Inc., all based in Springfield – filed suit, claiming they were unfairly excluded from city business. The suit is still pending.

“Sometimes it could be one to half a dozen students coming into the community injected into a system by a social agenda, and then in a couple of days, they could disappear and are relocated somewhere else. The costs are astronomical. There is no getting around that,” said Glusko.

In West Springfield, 134 homeless families were housed in hotels and motels in November – or about 12 percent of the total population of homeless families statewide.

“At 12 percent, we’re supporting just about all of (the homeless families) in Western Massachusetts here in West Springfield,” Mayor Edward J. Gibson said. “It’s a strain on our economic resources.”

The school district has an employee work part-time as a social worker and part-time as an adjustment counselor in the elementary schools to assist homeless families.

In Westfield, 87 homeless students were in the city schools in 2009, with related busing costs of $115,740.

Students are entitled to after-school programs, MCAS prep courses, and tutoring, along with free lunch, translators if necessary, and information and referral to family services.